Climate of Change by Piers Anthony

Author:Piers Anthony
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tom Doherty Associates

We don’t really know the history or interpersonal relations of the Australian Aborigines before the white man took over their continent. But their diet and legends are as presented here. They did not have pottery or the bow and arrow, as these things seem to have been developed after they crossed to Australia, but did have the spear, atlatl, war club, and boomerang. They did not practice formal agriculture, but did preserve yam plants and spit fruit seeds into fertilized ground as described. So they understood the principles of planting and nurturing, and surely would have taken it farther had it been expedient. They did just fine, until the more advanced technology of the Europeans intruded.

Rebel’s dream visions were of two kinds: Dreamtime legends existing among various Aborigine clans, and re-creations of the ancestors of humankind. They were correct in essence, if not in detail; she tended to fill in details she knew in her present, such as dingo dogs, that had not been domesticated two million years before. She was tracing the development of her species, in her fashion, as she sought to recover her faculty of language.

The thing that most clearly distinguishes mankind from all other species on Earth is his giant brain, monstrous for a body his size. Theories for its development abound, and there may be no consensus, but the evidence is growing that it was symbolic language that powered the brain’s ascent. When our ancestors diverged from the chimpanzees, they started out with similar mental capacities. But Australopithecus may have stumbled on a better way to get along: the first organized verbal symbols. Many animals have verbal expressions for danger, pain, warning, comfort, alarm or whatever, and these can be considered symbols, as a cry of pain is not the pain itself. But they are fixed; the animals do not organize or manipulate them. They never say, “If you get bitten by a rattlesnake, you will be in pain.” They don’t have language. Neither did our ancestors, originally, but somewhere along the way they took the step that led to the first very simple language. It may have consisted of all proper nouns, with each significant tree or rock or path given its special name. It may have developed adjectives to qualify those nouns: the good berries, the bad leopard, making communication more flexible. They may have discovered prepositions: leopard in the berry patch, fruit under the tree. That may have led to verbs: the leopard is in the berry patch. We don’t know how it developed, just that it did. Slowly, over the course of millennia, of eons, true symbolic language developed. Because even the simplest language was immensely more complicated than mere animal sounds, it powered an enormous increase in the size of the brain. This in turn forced other significant compromises, such as the reduction of body fur and promotion of sweating as a cooling mechanism, because that burgeoning brain had to be cooled. But it was worth it, because with superior

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